With the Federal Communications Commission set to vote Friday on whether to require broadcasters to post political ad data online, the industry has been scrambling to water down the proposed rule.

The data is currently available only on paper at TV stations. We’ve been tracking the flurry of lobbying against the rule by big media companies, including the owners of many of the nation’s largest news outlets. In the latest development, Communications Daily reported earlier this week that the FCC has become more receptive to the industry’s attempts to soften the proposed rule.

The exact contents of the rule may be in flux until the vote on Friday, and we won’t get a look at the text of the rule itself until sometime after the vote. Those who follow the FCC closely say that while we will likely know the broad outlines of the rule on Friday, the exact text is sometimes not completed and released until days or even weeks after a vote.

But because the FCC might water down the rule, it’s a good time to take a look at exactly what the broadcasters’ counterproposal would mean for the public’s access to the political ad data.

The FCC is made up of two Democrats who have spoken broadly in favor of the proposed rule and one Republican who has criticized it. Citing unnamed “agency and industry officials,” Communications Daily reported Monday (subscription required) that the two Democrats appeared to be showing some give on the crucial issue of whether broadcasters would have to put all 2014 or just some 2014 political ad data online.

“[T]hey said the potential for changes appears higher now than it did earlier last week, when [FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski seemed set against any modifications,” the publication reported.

In a speech at the annual tradeshow of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas last week, Genachowski appeared to stand firm against the industry’s lobbying. He answered the industry’s arguments one by one and decried its stance “against transparency and against journalism.”

But Mignon Clyburn, the other Democratic commissioner, reportedly struck a “conciliatory note” in her remarks on the political ad files at the NAB show. “I can affirm to you that in terms of this process, this office is still open for engagement,” she said, according to Communications Daily.

Republican Robert McDowell has echoed the industry’s opposition to the proposed rule.

Lobbying disclosures filed with the FCC this week outline a final proposal written by a Washington attorney for a group that includes the National Association of Broadcasters, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, Univision and other stations. (Here is the full list.)

The proposal represents a last-ditch bid by the industry to undermine the rule, which is expected to pass in some form. Just a couple of weeks ago, NAB chief Gordon Smith, a former senator, visited the FCC to express the industry’s flat opposition to any online disclosure rule.

Under the industry’s proposal, broadcasters would post to an FCC website the aggregate amount of each purchase of political ads instead of the full itemized information that is currently in the paper files.

Advocates of full online disclosure argue the broadcasters’ proposal is lacking in a few key respects.

The Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition pointed out in a April 19 letter to the FCC chairman that the broadcasters’ proposal would conceal “more detailed information about how much stations charge for the purchase of political advertising time, as well as whether a station accepted or rejected a request to purchase time, the date and time a political advertising message aired, and the class of time purchased.”

Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, told ProPublica that the full, itemized data are important in assessing whether broadcasters are abiding by rules requiring that they offer candidates the cheapest rates and equal opportunity to buy ad time.

“Only by looking at each ad request can you determine whether they are abiding by the statute,” said McGehee, whose organization is a member of the public interest coalition.

Jonathan Blake, the Covington & Burling attorney who authored the broadcasters’ proposal, declined to comment.

Corie Wright, senior policy counsel at Free Press, wrote the public interest coalition’s letter. She told ProPublica that information on the so-called disposition of political ad requests 2014 that is, whether a station rejected a candidate’s request to purchase time 2014 “is extremely important because it enables communities to assess whether broadcasters are using their government-granted monopoly of public spectrum to slant democratic outcomes in favor of one side of an issue over another.”

McGehee, of the Campaign Legal Center, said she won’t be surprised if the FCC bows to the broadcasters’ demands.

“I never underestimate the power of the broadcasters,” she said. “They have a pretty powerful combination. They are big political givers. They are right there in the communities of the members of Congress who are loathe to offend their broadcasters.”

by Justin Elliott ProPublica, April 26, 2012, 12:10 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Gregory Johnston / Shutterstock.com

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Update (4/26): An earlier version of this story said a proposed amendment by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., had helped gain support for CISPA. Schiff’s amendment, which among other things would further define what’s considered a “cyber threat,” is no longer scheduled for consideration.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, up for debate in the House of Representatives today, has privacy activists, tech companies, security wonks and the Obama administration all jousting about what it means 2013 not only for security but Internet privacy and intellectual property. Backers expect CISPA to pass, unlike SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that melted down amid controversy earlier this year.

Here’s a rundown on the debate and what CISPA could mean for Internet users.

What exactly is CISPA?

The act, sponsored Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., would make it easier for private corporations and U.S. agencies, including military and intelligence, to share information related to “cyber threats.”

In theory, this would enable the government and companies to keep up-to-date on security risks and protect themselves more efficiently. CISPA would amend the National Security Act of 1947, which currently contains no reference to cyber security.  Companies wouldn’t be required to share any data. They would just be allowed to do so.

Why should I care?

CISPA could enable companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers, to share your personal information with the National Security Agency and the CIA, as long as that information is deemed to pertain to a cyber threat or to national security.

How does the bill define “cyber threat”?

The bill itself defines it as information “pertaining to a vulnerability of” a system or network 2014 a definition that opponents have criticized as too broad. The bill gained support after sponsors agreed to allow votes on several amendments they said would make concessions to privacy activists; one aims to narrow the definition of “cyber threat.”

When can data be shared?

Rogers said the amended version of the bill would only enable companies and intelligence agencies to share information related to 1) cyber security purposes; 2) investigation and prosecution of cyber security crimes; 3) protection of individuals from death and bodily harm; 4) child pornography; or 5) protection of the national security of the United States.

Why are privacy activists upset about CISPA?

Privacy activists like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation contend CISPA isn’t specific enough about just what constitutes a “cyber threat.” They say it enables Internet companies and service providers to hand over sensitive user information to intelligence agencies without enough oversight from the civilian side of government.

Finally, they say it does not explicitly require Internet companies to remove identifying information about users before sharing. Opponents contend, for instance, that Facebook or Twitter could share user messages with the NSA or FBI without redacting the user’s name or personal details.

CISPA also protects the private sector from liability even if they share private user information, as long as that information is deemed to have been shared for cybersecurity or national security purposes. Even though sharing is voluntary and not required under the law, privacy activists say the legal immunity CISPA provides would make it easy for the government to pressure Internet companies to give up user data.

What kind of information can be shared?

Private companies and government agencies can share any information that pertains to a “cyber threat” or that would endanger national security. That could include user information, emails, and direct messages. Companies would be allowed to share with each other as well as the government.

The government is not allowed to proactively search company-provided information for purposes unrelated to cyber security, but opponents say this would be tough to enforce. The bill does not place any explicit limit on how long that information can be kept. Several proposed amendments would limit the amount and kinds of information that can be shared, but it remains to be seen which 2014 if any 2014 will be adopted.

Is CISPA basically SOPA 2.0?

No, it’s very different.

SOPA was about intellectual property; CISPA is about cyber security, but opponents believe both bills have the potential to trample constitutional rights. The comparisons to SOPA stem from language in an earlier version of CISPA that referenced intellectual property. That wording was removed early on in response to mounting criticism. SOPA would have strengthened copyright laws, barring search engines and other websites from linking to sites that violated intellectual property regulations.

That prompted a First Amendment concern from critics that it would give government the power to block websites wholesale, trampling free speech. CISPA’s liability shield, on the other hand, has sparked a concern based on the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. Opponents contend the law would make it too easy for private companies and the intelligence community to spy on users in the name of cyber security.

Why are some of the tech companies that protested SOPA, like Facebook and Microsoft, now supporting this bill?

CISPA gives Internet companies the ability to share threat information with intelligence agencies and receive information back from them, an ability they say would enable them to deal with cyber threats more effectively. It does not compel them to protect users’ privacy (though a variety of proposed amendments aim to add more stringent privacy protections). Companies could not be held liable for divulging a user’s identity or data to the government if the information relates to a “cyber threat.”

What’s the Obama administration’s take?

The White House is backing a Senate bill proposed by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and has threatened to veto CISPA. Officials cite a lack of personal privacy protections. They say CISPA would enable military and intelligence agencies to take on a policing role on the internet, which the administration points out is a civilian sphere.

What is CISPA’s path forward in Congress?

A vote is set for Friday. CISPA has accumulated more than 100 cosponsors and will most likely pass the House. “This isn’t about scrambling to meet 218 votes, we are well past that,” co-sponsor Rogers said during a conference call with reporters. But the Senate is a different story 2014 there, it must compete with the Lieberman cyber security bill and one from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Would CISPA really make us more secure?

It’s unclear.

Some cyber security specialists note that neither CISPA nor other cyber security bills in Congress would compel companies to update software, hire outside specialists or take other measures to preemptively secure themselves against hackers and other threats. CISPA’s backers respond that the bill would forestall a “digital Pearl Harbor,” allowing a freer flow of information for a quicker and more effective response to hackers by both the government and the private sector.

by Megha Rajagopalan ProPublica, April 26, 2012, 1:16 p.m.

The article Is CISPA SOPA 2.0? We Explain the Cybersecurity Bill appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

This story was published as an op-ed in The New York Times.

Two years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, another $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Prior to the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Texas, exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.

None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP 2014 John Browne and Tony Hayward among them 2014 were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations 2014 corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on 2014 could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless it changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety.

Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods 2014 and the demands of Wall Street 2014 became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy 2014 which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents 2014 shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes: did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines 2014 more than $70 million 2014 and committed to spend at least another $800 million on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighs the cost of doing business right.

But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that cause an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.

Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility 2014 or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 8 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com

The article A Punishment BP Can’t Pay Off appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued the first-ever national air pollution regulations for fracking on Wednesday. First proposed in July 2011, the final rules have been welcomed by environmental groups as a much-needed initial move in reducing pollution and protecting public health from the toxic chemicals involved in the oil and natural gas drilling process. But many cautioned it was just a first step.

“It sets a floor for what the industry needs to do,” said attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center. “The reality is we can do far better.”

Over the past few years, more information has come out about fracking’s potential harms to the environment and human health, particularly relating to the risk of groundwater contamination.

In addition to the many potentially toxic components of the highly pressurized fluid injected into the ground during the natural gas drilling process, fracking can also release cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and greenhouse gases like methane into the air. The federal government has made moves to tighten regulations, and we’ve chronicled the history of those regulations.

The EPA’s new rules don’t cover most of those issues. Instead, they address a single problem with natural gas: air pollution.

“These rules do not resolve chronic water, public health and other problems associated with fracking and natural gas,” Schlenker-Goodrich said.

The agency is actually barred from regulating the impact of fracking on groundwater because, in 2005, Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Water Drinking Act. Congressional proposals to give the EPA more oversight have so far failed.

With the new rules on air pollution, the EPA rejected an industry request to exempt some wells with low emissions of toxic compounds but did give drilling companies more time to comply. Notably, the final version provides a two-and-a-half-year transition period (rather than the 60 days in the original proposal) that gives drilling companies until 2015 to comply with the strictest regulations.

The industry lobbied hard for the delay, and its reaction to the rules have been mixed.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil industry trade group, said it is still reviewing the new rules but said it’s happy with changes from the original proposal that will allow companies to “continue reducing emissions while producing the oil and natural gas our country needs.” Another industry group told The New York Times that the rules are too strict and could “make exploring in new areas cost-prohibitive.”

A key rule targets one large source of air pollution 2014 the burst of gas released during the first few days after a well is first tapped but before production begins. The EPA requires that companies start using “green completions,” a technology that captures the released gas and fumes in tanks and transports them via pipelines to be sold as fuel. (The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good breakdown of the process).

Many drilling companies already use green-completion systems. One natural-gas company recently told Bloomberg that the system doesn’t cost the company “any more than just venting the gas into the atmosphere.” The EPA says that once companies buy the necessary equipment to separate and collect the released gas, they could actually make up to $19 million a year selling the captured gas.

“By ensuring the capture of gases that were previously released to pollute our air and threaten our climate, these updated standards will not only protect our health, but also lead to more product for fuel suppliers to bring to market,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.

For the next two and a half years, in addition to trapping the gas, companies are allowed to burn off, or “flare,” the excess gas, which reduces air toxins but is wasteful because the gas can’t be resold. Peter Zalzal of the Environmental Defense Fund said the EPA rules give companies an incentive to adopt the green-completion technology instead of flaring.

by Lena Groeger ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 11:09 a.m.

Image Courtesy of   Adrian Kinloch

The article The EPA’s First Fracking Rules 2014 Limited and Delayed appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

April 19: This story has been corrected.

This story was co-published with PBS Frontline.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.

One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.

After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100 multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.

As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.

For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

For the last two years, ProPublica and PBS “Frontline,” in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.

Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.

Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.

Among its members are top names in science and law, from Henry Lee, the renowned criminalist, to John Douglas, the former FBI profiler and bestselling author. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent forensic pathologist and frequent TV commentator on high-profile crimes, chairs the group’s executive advisory board.

But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz 2013 the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI — was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.

Several former ACFEI employees call the group a mill designed to churn out and sell as many certificates as possible. They say applicants receive cursory, if any, background checks and that virtually everyone passes the group’s certification exams as long as their payments clear.

Some forensic professionals say the organization’s willingness to hand out credentials diminishes the integrity of the field.

“I am insulted by it,” said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist for Maryland’s chief medical examiner office and the vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “They seem like an organization that’s all about the money.”

Robert O’Block, ACFEI’s founder, vigilantly defends the group’s work, saying it has helped make forensics more accessible. He told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that the ACFEI credentials are not designed to qualify experts in court and emphasized only a judge can make that determination.

O’Block also said he’s been unfairly criticized by other professional groups that compete with ACFEI in certain regards, including the AAFS, Weedn’s group.

“I have been fighting for 20 years for an open educational certification and accreditation in forensic examination,” O’Block wrote in an email. “But they have painted me as the bad guy.”

* * *

The judges who must determine whether to qualify a witness as an expert face an alphabet’s soup of organizations with differing standards. Some, like the American Board of Criminalistics, vet members extensively, requiring them to pass intensive board exams to demonstrate their skills. Others, as noted in the NAS report, are far less stringent.

Experts in the field worry that inconsistent standards and training for forensic examiners can lead to miscarriages of justice 2014 to the guilty walking free and the innocent being locked up or worse.

“There are a lot of people practicing, but there’s no assurance that they have the requisite training and board certification to see if they do have the skills to do the practical [work],” said Dr. Marcella Fierro, one of the NAS report’s authors and the former chief medical examiner of Virginia.

Under state and federal rules of evidence, judges decide whether prospective expert witnesses can testify, but they sometimes rely heavily on the titles and letters around someone’s name.

“Credentials are often appealing shortcuts,” Michigan circuit court judge Donald Shelton said. Fancy titles can have a disproportionate effect on juries, he added. “Jurors have no way of knowing that this certifying body, whether it’s this one or any other one, exacts scientific standards or is just a diploma mill.”

O’Block, 60, founded the organization that grew into ACFEI in Branson, Mo., in 1992, after being rejected for membership by a credentialing organization for forensic handwriting experts.

As chronicled in “United for Truth,” ACFEI’s self-published history, his goal was to create an alternative group open to those with all levels of experience. “It didn’t matter that he, himself, was not then one of the anointed handwriting experts,” the book says, “because he already knew that he was an expert at making things happen.”

O’Block launched his first credentialing programs while teaching criminal justice at the College of the Ozarks. Initially, the fledgling operation offered correspondence certifications in forensic document examination and behavior profiling for $100 apiece.

Over time, the organization expanded its offerings, adding dozens of courses to certify applicants in various aspects of forensics, from counseling to nursing to accounting. Applicants must become members of ACFEI to become certified; on top of my course fee, I paid $165 in membership dues.

O’Block also founded related associations that offer credentials in other fields, including psychotherapy and integrative medicine. One, the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, attracted a powerful new client: the Defense Department. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has paid more than $8.5 million for sailors to obtain credentials in such specialties as “Disaster Preparedness” and “Sensitive Security Information” through a program separate from the one for forensics.

Today, there are two entities that go by the ACFEI acronym 2014 the original, which is a non-profit, and a related for-profit company called the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute of Forensic Science. O’Block is president of both and, according to tax filings, received total compensation of more than $430,000 in 2010.

ACFEI and its related entities have continued to expand under O’Block’s leadership, growing to about 20,000 members combined, despite periodic controversies.

In 1998, when ACFEI proposed offering an online doctorate in forensic science, dozens of forensics professionals and educators wrote to the Missouri Board of Higher Education to protest the plan. “The questions are suitable for a grade school child,” wrote one. ACFEI dropped its application.

Then, in 2002, the story broke about the cat. O’Block remains vexed by what he calls a “stunt” orchestrated by a member of a competing professional organization.

“First of all, ACFEI did not certify a cat2026[It] certified a human being who used fraudulent credentials and called himself Dr. Katz,” O’Block wrote in an email.

Since then, O’Block said, ACFEI has changed its verification process, requiring applicants to submit multiple professional references and be placed on provisional status while their application is pending.

Two days after I passed the Certified Forensic Consultant exam, I received an email from ACFEI asking me for additional materials. I emailed the group my references, a resume and a scanned copy of my college diploma. Less than an hour later, I received an email saying I could start using my forensic consultant designation.

None of my references was contacted by the group.

According to a statement provided by ACFEI’s attorney, that step was deemed unnecessary in my case.

“Professional references are requested in the event questions arise concerning an applicant’s eligibility for the credentialing program in which they are applying,” the statement said. “Since applicant clearly met the requirements for the Certified Forensic Consultant program, professional references were not contacted.”

* * *

Among forensic professionals, there continues to be fierce debate over the quality of ACFEI’s courses — and what being certified by the group actually signifies.

ACFEI advertises itself as an educational institution and markets its certificates as building up holders’ value as witnesses in court. Expert witnesses are typically paid for their testimony.

The page on its web site for the certification I obtained 2014 Certified Forensic Consultant 2014 says, “The CFC credential contributes to the weight of an individual’s testimony relating to qualifications, knowledge of the scope of the issues, the validity of the evidence presented, application of specialized knowledge to the facts in the case, and the relevance of the evidence to the issues in the case.”

But both O’Block and Wecht, the group’s official spokesman, stressed that ACFEI certificates alone don’t make you an expert.

“It’s designed to make somebody feel good, to make them feel they’ve accomplished something, and I would hope they have,” Wecht said in an interview. “Does it really qualify them to be the expert in a particular field? No.”

Wecht also dismissed the notion that the group’s use of “college” in its name could be misleading. “That’s a play on words,” he said. “Nobody believes for one moment that it is a real college.”

In an interview and an email, O’Block defended ACFEI’s credentialing programs by saying the group held seven outside “accreditations and approvals.”

But ACFEI is not recognized as an accredited institution of higher learning by Missouri, where it is incorporated, or by the U.S. Department of Education, which maintains a registry of accredited schools.

A number of organizations, such as the California Board of Registered Nursing and the American Psychological Association, recognize ACFEI as a provider of continuing education. But that’s not the same as institution-wide accreditation, said Leroy Wade, the Assistant Commissioner of the Missouri Board of Higher Education.

“There’s really no oversight that regulates the CE providers in general, at least not in this state,” Wade said. “You can’t put any stock in the fact that an organization states it’s a continuing education provider.”

Several former ACFEI staffers say they came to question how the group writes and administers its exams.

John Bridges was hired as ACFEI’s president and chief executive in 2010 after decades in government, most recently as an administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He left ACFEI after just nine months, frustrated, he says, by the group’s practices.

“Based on my perception of what went on related to standards and quality, it operated like a certification mill,” he said.

Though ACFEI offers both basic courses and more advanced, specialized certificates, Bridges said, its exams are designed so that anyone can pass. He put the failure rate at less than 1 percent.

“If you want to be validated by somebody,” Bridges said, “this organization will validate you.”

O’Block initially said that ACFEI did not keep pass/fail rates for its exams. Later, the group’s attorney said it did keep such statistics, but he did not provide them upon request.

Other former employees said it was routine for low-level staffers to write exams for ACFEI and its related organizations based on textbooks in subject areas in which they had no expertise.

Tania Miller worked for six months as chief association officer for the American Psychotherapy Association, an ACFEI sister group, beginning in fall 2010. A few weeks into her job, she said, she was asked to author an exam to certify forensic counselors. Miller’s background was in marketing and graphic design. She said she declined to write the exam. ACFEI did not respond to questions about Miller.

The Forensic Consultant test I took focused primarily on rules of evidence and courtroom procedure. Some questions required specialized knowledge (i.e., Which rule is known as the “Admissibility of Expert Testimony” rule in the Federal Rules of Evidence? Answer: 702), but ACFEI’s study packets helped me fill in the blanks, making it basically an open-book exam. The rest of the questions relied largely on common sense (i.e., When providing testimony, which of the following should you NOT do? Answer: Cross your arms and joke with the jury.)

ACFEI did not answer questions about what level of expertise it requires of those who write its exams. According to its catalog, some of the exams are authored by prominent specialists, including Wecht.

O’Block vehemently denies that ACFEI is a diploma mill, saying the group has thousands of satisfied members. He has filed five lawsuits in the last year against individuals 2014 mostly bloggers 2014 who have posted statements O’Block claims are defamatory about his organizations. One is pending. The others have been dismissed by courts or at the parties’ request after bloggers agreed to take down posts.

Wecht, whose signature appears on some ACFEI certificates (including mine), said he didn’t know how applicants did on the group’s tests, but emphasized that the group’s program is mostly about fostering enthusiasm for the field.

“The purpose of the organization is to encourage people who are interested in forensic science to learn more, to study more,” he said.

* * *

To critics, the greatest concern about ACFEI is the potential that the organization is giving legitimacy to expert witnesses who don’t warrant it.

Among the thousands of people that ACFEI has certified is one particularly controversial expert in forensic pathology: Dr. Steven Hayne.

Hayne, the longtime pathologist for the state of Mississippi, performed the autopsies in two shocking 1990s cases in which three-year-old girls were abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered.

In both cases, Hayne testified he had observed bite marks on the young girls. He said he had called in a forensic dentist who confirmed that the marks were human and matched them to dental impressions from the defendants in each case. These findings aided in the convictions of Levon Brooks for the first murder and of Kennedy Brewer for the second. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison. Brewer was sentenced to death.

After the men spent more than 30 years combined incarcerated, the Innocence Project recovered DNA evidence that led investigators to the real killer. He confessed to both crimes, but denied biting the victims.

Hayne no longer conducts autopsies for the state, but continues to give testimony as an expert witness. Testifying in March 2010 in Lamar County Circuit Court, Hayne was asked what board certifications he held. “I’m board certified in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology and forensic medicine,” he replied.

Hayne has credentials in anatomic and clinical pathology from the American Board of Pathology, considered the gold standard, but not in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death. For that, he cites his Certified Forensic Physician credential from ACFEI and certification in forensic pathology from the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons.

When attorneys for the Innocence Project submitted a wide-ranging complaint about Hayne to the Mississippi board of licensure, they cited Hayne’s reliance on these organizations to allege he had misrepresented his credentials.

“Certification by these organizations is not at all what the medical community and public understand when a doctor claims to be ‘board certified,’” the complaint said, referring to ACFEI and the other group.

Citing ongoing litigation, Hayne declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” beyond confirming that he is certified by ACFEI. He has sued the Innocence Project for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Wecht acknowledged he knew of Hayne by reputation, but told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that he had not known Hayne was certified by ACFEI.

* * *

In its 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences called for several measures to address systemic flaws involving forensic examiners and expert testimony.

Certification should be mandatory for forensics professionals and should be overseen by a centralized credentialing agency, the report said.

One of the report’s primary authors, Harry T. Edwards — a federal appeals court judge for the District of Columbia 2013 said these changes were critical to imposing rigorous standards on the field..

“There are certifiers, but it’s not what you and I are talking about — that is, real certification programs that train, give serious tests and will revoke your license and affect your job and ability to testify in the event that you do something wrong or fail,” Edwards said in an interview. “That doesn’t exist now.”

Despite the controversies that dog it, ACFEI may aspire to fill that role. In a promotional video filmed after the NAS report’s release, Wecht said its findings presented the group with a unique opportunity.

“We can play a role, the challenge has been issued,” he said. “The NAS report can be a blessing to our organization.”

I’ve never tested whether my $495 forensic consultant credential from ACFEI would carry any weight on the witness stand.

Asked about my certification, O’Block responded this way:

“Congratulate Leah for passing the CFC,” he wrote in an August 2011 email. “That course was designed as entry level to educate professionals about the justice system.”

Wecht said he doubted that having the certificate on my resume would be enough to persuade a court to allow me to give expert testimony. Any decent lawyer, he said, could easily cast doubt upon my qualifications.

“A kid right out of law school would say, 2018Ma’am, just exactly what is your training?’” Wecht said. “The point I’m making, you see, is that that piece of paper doesn’t mean that much.”

Leah Bartos graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in May 2011. Since then, she’s been a reporter-in-residence at the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

Andrés Cediel, the producer of PBS Frontline’s “The Real CSI” and Lowell Bergman, the film’s correspondent, contributed to this report.

Update (4/19): ACFEI has posted a response to our collaboration with PBS “Frontline” on its website. It defends the value of the group’s programs and says the pass rate on ACFEI exams is 86 percent.

Correction: This story identified Henry Lee as a pathologist. Lee has a PhD in biochemistry, but is not a medical doctor.

by Leah Bartos, Special to ProPublica April 17, 2012, 11:30 a.m.

The article No Forensic Background? No Problem appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

One of the most talked-about “dark money” groups of the election released its tax returns yesterday, showing it raised almost $77 million from fewer than 100 donors over 19 months. Most of the money spent in its first year went directly to political ads or grants to other groups.

The returns are the first glimpse showing how much money has been raised by Crossroads GPS, launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove in mid-2010.

(Here are the full returns, for both 2010 and 2011. We’ve marked interesting bits. If you spot something we haven’t, let us know.)

By choosing to include the number of donors and the amounts of some of its larger donations, including one of $10.1 million in the first year and another of $10.1 million in the last seven months of 2011, the group was somewhat more transparent than the IRS requires.

Still, Crossroads GPS, also known as Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, retained plenty of mystery 2014 namely, their donors’ identities.

There are no donor names, no clues as to whether they are individuals, companies or trade groups, and no hint as to whether there are repeated donors from year to year.

Nonprofits like Crossroads GPS, classified by the IRS as “social welfare” organizations, are not required to disclose their donors, even if those organizations spend money on political ads. That is why they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” groups.

Yesterday, two campaign-finance watchdog groups again called for the IRS to investigate the tax status of Crossroads GPS. Critics have complained that the group and others like it use the IRS social-welfare status as a fig leaf to be able to hide the names of donors. The IRS says a social-welfare nonprofit, or 501(c)4, must have social welfare as a “primary purpose” but has never defined what that means. Most groups interpret this to mean social-welfare nonprofits can spend up to 49 percent of their money on politics.

Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio responded to critics by sending an email message with the subject line “Snarky comments” that pointed out that some of the group’s critics are nonprofits that also don’t disclose their donors. In another email, he compared what the group does to how environmental and labor groups have operated for decades.

Although similar nonprofits engaged in politics in past elections, their use exploded in 2010, particularly in tandem with super PACs, taking advantage of federal court rulings that paved the way for a new role for outside-spending groups in elections.

The IRS doesn’t comment on individual groups but is expected to give more scrutiny to politicking social-welfare nonprofits this year, considering the major role the groups are expected to play in the election. Together with its affiliated super PAC, American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS hopes to raise $300 million, primarily to help defeat President Barack Obama and to elect Republicans to Congress.

Crossroads GPS reported 64 donors in its first year, between June 2010 and May 2011, including four who gave $10.1 million, $5 million, $4.5 million and $4 million. There were 32 donors in the last seven months of 2011, including two who gave $10 million and $4.3 million. It’s unknown whether any of them were repeat donors.

Between June 2010 and May 2011, Crossroads GPS spent about $42.3 million, including about $15.9 million directly for political ads and another $15.9 million on grants to 12 like-minded nonprofits and trade groups.

The $15.9 million that Crossroads GPS gave in grants coincided with the midterm 2010 elections. The money included $500,000 to the American Action Network, the conservative nonprofit that once shared an office with Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads, and $4 million to Americans for Tax Reform, formed by anti-tax activist and GOP heavy hitter Grover Norquist.

Federal Election Commission records show that these groups, as well as five other grant recipients of Crossroads GPS, spent money on political ads, directly or indirectly, in the 2010 election cycle. The grant money that groups received from Crossroads was earmarked for non-political activities.

In its 2011 filing, which covers the last seven months of the year, Crossroads GPS reported spending almost $22.4 million, including $1.7 million on political ads, including this anti-Obama ad. It gave only one grant, of $50,000, to a charity called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The organization describes itself as “D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.”

by Kim Barker ProPublica, April 18, 2012, 6 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Sachyn

The article Read the Tax Returns From Karl Rove’s ‘Dark Money’ Group (Donors Still a Mystery) appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank have let foreclosed homes in black and Latino neighborhoods lapse into disrepair, while bank-owned homes in mainly white neighborhoods are better cared-for, according to housing advocates.

The National Fair Housing Alliance, a non-profit group, brought a formal complaint to the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week alleging that Wells Fargo violated the Fair Housing Act by failing to keep up homes in minority neighborhoods. Today, the group announced they are also filing a second complaint, against U.S. Bank.

Earlier this month, the group released a survey, which was funded in part by HUD, of more than 1,000 unoccupied, foreclosed homes across the country owned by unspecified banks. When a house is foreclosed upon, the bank that takes it over is responsible for maintaining it. The report cites evidence 2014 photos and interviews with neighbors 2014 showing houses becoming dilapidated under banks’ watch.

The complaint against Wells Fargo claims that among more than 200 homes surveyed, those in black and Latino neighborhoods were much more likely to have yards filled with trash, broken doors, damaged windows, and other signs of neglect. Fewer homes in those neighborhoods had “for sale” signs visible. For example, 68 out of 149 homes in black and Latino neighborhoods had damaged roofs, compared to only nine out of 69 properties in white neighborhoods.

The study looked at homes owned by Wells Fargo in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Oakland, Calif., and Dayton, Ohio.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said in an emailed statement that the bank “conducts all lending-related activities in a fair and consistent manner without regard to race: this includes maintenance and marketing standards for all foreclosed properties for which we are responsible.” She also said that the bank has a dedicated department that maintains and markets foreclosed properties from loans that are within its portfolio. Since the complaint did not identify specific properties, she said, Wells Fargo has not been able to investigate its claims.

U.S. Bank did not immediately respond to our request for comment, and a spokesman for HUD declined to comment on the complaint.

The report also pointed out that there were simply fewer bank-owned foreclosed properties in white neighborhoods than in minority neighborhoods, an indication, it says, of the fact that African-American and Latino communities were disproportionately affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Numerous studies have shown that lenders targeted minorities for the riskiest loans, and often charged them more than similarly qualified white borrowers. A report from the Center for Responsible Lending found that black and Latino homeowners were twice as likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than white homeowners.

(The center was started with support from the Sandler Foundation, which is also the major funder of ProPublica.) In the biggest settlement to come out of the government post-bubble investigation of discriminatory lending practices, lender Countrywide (now owned by Bank of America) agreed to pay $335 million to settle a Department of Justice suit.

Nationally, banks or investors own roughly half a million foreclosed homes, and the Federal Reserve estimates this will increase to 1 million this year. Some banks and investors are looking to unload the properties en masse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who own about half the properties, are piloting a program for bulk sales of their foreclosed properties that requires they be offered as rentals. Other lenders are turning into landlords themselves.

by Cora Currier ProPublica, April 16, 2012, 5:10 p.m.

The article Big Banks Slack on Maintaining Foreclosed Homes in Minority Areas, Complaint Charges appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

In November 2001, Bank of New York, a mid-tier U.S. bank, transferred nearly $8 billion of its own assets to a trust in the small, business-friendly state of Delaware through several layers of newly created companies.

A mixture of home mortgages, shares and other securities, the transferred assets made up almost 10 percent of the bank’s total assets at the time. Yet, the transaction was not discussed with BNY’s regulators; nor was it noted in the bank’s financial statements or annual report. It had little practical effect on the lender’s day-to-day operations 2014 the assets continued to be managed and serviced by the same employees in New York.

But it was a critical first step in setting up a complex structure known as STARS 2014 structured trust advantaged repackaged securities 2014 which U.S. tax authorities claim was used by several American banks as an abusive tax shelter that has cost the government more than $1 billion in tax revenue in the past decade.

This week, BNY will square off against the Internal Revenue Service in U.S. Tax Court in New York over STARS and the tax benefits tit triggered for the U.S. bank and U.K.-based Barclays, its counterpart in the deal. At issue is whether STARS was set up primarily to generate artificial foreign-tax credits, as the IRS contends; or was a legal way for BNY to obtain financing at rock-bottom rates.

The arguments heard this week will pose a crucial test of the U.S. government’s resolve to rein in sophisticated corporate tax planning that has sapped vast amounts of potential revenue. Tax authorities worldwide, notably in the U.S. and U.K., are under mounting pressure to show that large companies are shouldering their share of the tax burden as part of a broader political debate about fairness and corporate social responsibility.

“We are upping our game in the large business area, particularly as it relates to international tax issues,” Douglas Shulman, the U.S. internal revenue commissioner, said in a speech this month in Washington, D.C.

For the IRS, losing the STARS disputes would be a serious blow to its strategy in high-value cases, tax lawyers said. For the banks, the risk is both financial 2014 $900 million is at stake in the BNY case alone 2014 and to their reputations.

An investigation last year by the Financial Times and ProPublica first detailed how STARS produced tax benefits for U.S. banks beginning in 1999. In all, six banks 2014 BNY (now Bank of New York Mellon), BB&T, Sovereign (now a unit of Santander), Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo), Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo 2014 participated in STARS deals with Barclays between 1999 and 2006.

Five of those banks are challenging IRS rulings that disallowed foreign tax credits generated in those transactions. WaMu has settled a STARS dispute in bankruptcy court by agreeing to forgo $160 million in claimed tax credits. In total, the IRS says, the STARS deals created $3.4 billion in foreign tax credits.

Now, documents filed in BNY’s case in the past few weeks 2014 the court proceedings begin Monday 2014 provide unprecedented detail about how STARS was crafted at a time when banks and accounting firms were offering deals for multinational corporations to take advantage of loopholes in rules governing foreign tax credits.

At the simplest level, foreign tax credits are designed to prevent U.S. companies from being taxed twice on overseas income by allowing them to claim credit for taxes paid in foreign jurisdictions.

In the BNY case, the IRS claims STARS allowed both Barclays and BNY to claim credits for the same “illusory” foreign tax charges, ultimately reducing the U.S. government’s tax revenue by $18.15 for every $100 of income funneled through the Delaware trust. “The record will establish that STARS was a pricey financing that no prudent banker would undertake but for the tax benefits generated by the meaningless circulation of cash flows,” according to a court filing by the IRS on March 27.

BNY has argued that the deal was a complex but entirely legal, allowing the bank access to low-cost financing from Barclays for its everyday business activities.

Brainchild of Barclays

Like hundreds of other foreign-tax-driven transactions sold to companies in the boom years before the financial crisis of 2008, STARS was developed by Barclays’ famed structured finance group, known as Structured Capital Markets. Roger Jenkins, one of Britain’s best-known dealmakers, and Iain Abrahams, the expert behind most of the bank’s tax arbitrage transactions, led SCM. The idea was for STARS to manufacture tax credits for Barclays and a U.S. corporate taxpayer by circulating U.S. income through an entity taxed in the U.K., the IRS said in its filing.

Because of the differences between U.S. and U.K. accounting rules, STARS would allow Barclays to reimburse a U.S. company for half the tax paid in the U.K. while not reducing the amount of foreign tax credits that could be claimed by either party, the IRS said. Barclays is not a party to the IRS dispute with BNY and has not been accused of wrongdoing by U.S. authorities.

According to the IRS, blue-chip U.S. companies including Microsoft and insurers AIG and Prudential Life passed on early versions of STARS for unspecified reasons. But the IRS said BNY, which bought the deal in 2001, had grown “addicted” to tax-driven transactions, which provided it with an important source of revenue.

Before buying STARS, the IRS says, BNY had entered into more than 100 “lease-back” transactions, known as Lilos and Silos, that produced tax advantages. Shortly after participating in STARS, BNY also purchased from Barclays another foreign-tax-credit structure, nicknamed Toga, that involved high-grade debt securities, the IRS said.

“Barclays understood that BNY was highly receptive to a wide range of tax-based ideas, and had targeted BNY for an SCM 2018tax product’ after discussions with BNY senior executives,” the IRS said in its court filing.

The IRS also described KPMG as a pivotal player. The accounting firm provided a U.S. tax opinion blessing the structure for Barclays and sold STARS to BNY for a fee of $6 million, according to the IRS filing.

David Brockway, then of KPMG, was engaged to provide the firm’s opinion on STARS, and is expected to testify at trial, according to the IRS. Brockway, a leading U.S. tax lawyer, left KPMG in April 2005 amid scrutiny of the firm’s previous sales of potentially abusive tax shelters.

The IRS also has named lawyer Raymond Ruble, formerly a partner at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., as a key adviser on the structure. Ruble was convicted of multiple counts of income-tax evasion in a separate tax-shelter case involving wealthy taxpayers in 2009. He is in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

The IRS, Barclays, BNY, KPMG and Sidley Austin declined to comment on the case. Jenkins, now a partner at the Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual; Abrahams, still a senior executive at Barclays in London; and Brockway, now a Washington-based partner at the law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP, also declined to comment.

$900 Million Disputed

Both sides acknowledge that BNY’s STARS deal was executed through highly choreographed steps. First, BNY transferred about $7.9 billion of income-producing assets to the Delaware trust through layers of newly created subsidiaries. Barclays, as the counterpart, acquired shares in the trust, giving it a right to nearly all the income generated by the assets. In return, Barclays loaned $1.5 billion to BNY, also via the trust.

Barclays and BNY then executed a repurchase agreement, or “repo,” under which BNY agreed to buy back the shares in the Delaware trust five years later, in November 2006. BNY appointed a U.K. company as trustee of the Delaware trust, making the income it produced subject to U.K. tax.

At the outset of the deal, the trust’s pool of assets were expected to generate about $460 million of income a year 2014 of which, at a tax rate of 22 percent, $100 million would be paid to U.K. tax authorities. When the trust income failed to reach $460 million, as expected, BNY injected extra assets, essentially to boost the income stream.

At the heart of the structure are differences between how it is treated under U.S. and U.K. tax law. Under U.K. rules, Barclays was allowed to take a deduction against its other taxable income in the U.K. on the condition that it immediately reinvested the income produced by the assets in the trust. But it was able to simultaneously take a credit for the tax paid by the trust.

According to the IRS, those tax benefits were shared with BNY, generating gains for both banks. For every $100 of income circulated through the trust, the U.S. government lost $18.15, which funded BNY’s profit of $7.15, Barclays’ profit of $7.70 and U.K. tax receipts of $3.30, the IRS claims.

But under U.S. tax law, the deal was considered a secured lending arrangement. So, subject to U.S. tax rules, BNY, as owner of the U.K. trust, could also claim a foreign tax credit for the U.K. taxes paid. In 2001 and 2002, BNY claimed nearly $200 million in foreign tax credits from the STARS structure, which the IRS has disallowed. Including interest, the total amount in dispute is about $900 million, according to the bank’s most recent annual report.

“The foreign tax credits that Bank of New York claimed in the U.S. at a 22 percent rate were far more than the actual U.K. tax attributable to STARS,” the IRS said in its filing. “In other words, Bank of New York claimed credits for phantom U.K. tax expense.”

BNY is challenging the IRS’ refusal to allow the credits and says it entered the STARS deal to borrow low-cost funds. Because of the U.K. tax benefits the structure generated for Barclays, BNY claims the British bank was able to provide it with the five-year, $1.5 billion loan at more than three percentage points below the prevailing benchmark lending rate.

“The complication was required by Barclays’ U.K. tax objectives, not by BNY,” the bank said in a court filing March 27. “By lending to [BNY] through the structure that Barclays designed, Barclays could offer a very favorable borrowing rate.”

In the coming weeks, U.S. Tax Court will hear from the bankers, lawyers and accountants involved as well as a raft of experts. A final decision is not expected for at least several months.

With much at stake, BNY and the IRS appear to be digging in for a protracted battle. In its latest filing, BNY accuses the government of using “emotionally laden” arguments to try to deliver a “sweet sound bite.” The IRS says “no rational person” would have participated in STARS if not for the foreign tax credits.

Let the war of words begin.

Vanessa Houlder covers taxation and Megan Murphy investment banking for the Financial Times in London. Senior reporter Jeff Gerth is in Washington, D.C.

by Megan Murphy and Vanessa Houlder, Financial Times, and Jeff Gerth, ProPublica April 15, 2012, 3 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   wallyg

The article Bank of New York Case Tests IRS Power to Halt Foreign Tax Abuses appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Television stations are required by the Federal Communications Commission to keep a list of political ad buys and to make it available on request. Stations don’t post this data on the Internet, however, so the only way to get the records is to go in person.

We think this data is vitally important, and can reveal how big money influences elections. So to make it accessible to everyone, we started a project last month named “Free the Files” to recruit citizens and local journalists to visit TV stations and post these “Public File” documents online.

So far, more than 180 people in 37 states and the District of Columbia have volunteered to make copies of the files, then scan and e-mail them to us. We’ve heard from news organizations that are sending reporters (see files gathered by the Cincinnati Enquirer and by the Wisconsin State Journal), universities that are sending students (Northwestern University students checked the Chicago market), and from people with some spare time who want to help.

But with hundreds of TV stations and untold millions in political ad spending expected this year, we still need you! The process takes between 15-30 minutes at your TV station, plus however long it takes to scan and e-mail us the files.

Before you set out, please let us know you’re interested by signing up on this form. We’ll make sure you aren’t grabbing files that someone else has already checked, and we’ll help coordinate so this takes as little of your time as possible.

How to Gather and Submit the Files

What you’ll need: Some free time, access to a scanner, e-mail and good manners.

1) Go to the front desk of the television studio during business hours. Politely ask to see “the Public File.” They should know what you’re talking about, but if not, you can ask to speak to whoever handles political ads. It’s likely that a staff member will be summoned to escort you to the file.

2) The files are paper records, probably in manila file folders or binders. They should be organized by advertiser and client name. It would be great if you could copy everything, but ProPublica is primarily interested in spending by outside groups (super PACs and nonprofits), so if your time is limited please pull whatever files are there on these:

• Restore Our Future (pro-Romney)
• Winning Our Future (pro-Gingrich)
• Red White and Blue Fund (pro-Santorum)
• Endorse Liberty (pro-Paul)
• Priorities USA Action (pro-Obama)

3) There may not be any files on some of these groups if they have not been advertising in your market. For reference, our PAC Track news application lists the major super PACs that may have run ads in your state.

4) Ask for a photocopy of the selected files. Most stations will do this for free, but some will charge a small fee per page. Some may point you to the photocopy machine and ask you to do it.

5) Once you have all the copies, scan and e-mail them to tv.transparency@propublica.org (some stations may do this for you, but don’t count on it). We will post the files and credit you for your work. If you are from a news organization with a DocumentCloud account and want to submit the files that way, see the extra steps below.

A Few Things to Remember

Always treat the station’s staff with courtesy and respect 2014 they are likely to be more helpful. In the course of small talk, they may ask you why you are there. There is no need to be secretive. Your forms may look different from our sample forms. That’s OK. You should bring a small amount of cash in case you are charged for photocopies. It’s OK to say you’re helping ProPublica, but to avoid confusion, please do not identify yourself as a “ProPublica reporter.”

Thank you for helping. What you’re doing will make a real difference.

If you have questions before, during or after your visit to the station, please contact us for help. Here’s how:

Daniel Victor, ProPublica social media editor

E-mail: tv.transparency@propublica.org

Phone: 917-512-0219

Twitter: @bydanielvictor

If You’re Using DocumentCloud

DocumentCloud is a tool used by news organizations and others to post, annotate and embed the documents online. News organizations can request an account here. For those who already have a DocumentCloud account, here’s how to submit your Public Files:

1)    While logged in, upload your files by clicking the “New Documents” button on the left rail. Make sure they are set to “public” (as always, make sure there is no sensitive information like credit card numbers in the documents before publishing).

2)    Once the files are processed, highlight them under “Your Documents.” Click on “Edit”, then “Edit Document Data.”

3)    In the first field before the colon, type “contributedto” (case-sensitive). In the second field after the colon, type “freethefiles” (case-sensitive). This will allow all Free the Files contributors to easily find each other’s files.

by Daniel Victor ProPublica, April 6, 2012, 1:58 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/

The article Campaign Ads: How To Free the Files at Your TV Station appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Some homeowners are getting stuck with relatively high interest rates even after they participate in the government’s program to help them refinance their mortgages. The biggest banks are not lowering rates as much as they could be 2014 and homeowners have few options to go elsewhere.

Analysts say that the big banks are set to make major profits off of the Home Affordable Refinancing Program, also known as HARP, which allows homeowners with loans backed by government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance if they owe more than their home is worth.

The program, launched in 2009, is designed to let struggling borrowers take advantage of lower market interest rates. So far, about 1.1 million people have refinanced under the program, which was expanded last fall to make it more attractive for banks and to let more homeowners participate.

Since then, the government says there has been “tremendous borrower interest” and estimates that another 1 million could qualify over the next two years. But while the expansion may let more people refinance, it may not be at the lowest rate possible because the incentives don’t favor competition, according to a new report by an investment group Amherst Securities.

The report says the big banks are able to make a considerable profit from refinancing their existing customers under HARP, and that there is little incentive for them to go outside their own customer base and seek out more HARP business on mortgages that originated with other lenders.

Few other companies have stepped in to offer HARP refinancing for people who’d like to leave their current lender, partly because it is still risky for them to take on the underwater loans, even with the HARP incentives.

The result is that homeowners in many cases are stuck with what they’ve got, Amherst says, and the big banks can charge them more.

Guy Cecala, who runs the publication Inside Mortgage Finance, said that there is “virtually no competition” for the big banks. “It’s normal business practice for mortgage lenders 2014 when you can, you charge a higher interest rate.”

Here’s how this situation came about.

For Banks, Built-In Incentives

Last fall’s expansion of HARP tries to make it more appealing to mortgage lenders, since the initial response to the program fell short of expectations.

New rules removed the cap on how much a borrower could be underwater and still qualify. It also eased appraisal requirements and 2014 critically for banks 2014 removed some of the liability for bad loans that banks had when selling their mortgages to Fannie and Freddie.

The Amherst report points out that the biggest lenders 2014 JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo 2014 are responsible for more than 60 percent of HARP refinancing applications. The report also says the cost of refinancing an existing customer under HARP is minimal.

The big banks already have plenty of demand in-house. As such, it’s easier and more profitable to stick with the loans they already service than to compete for new business, which could result in lower rates for homeowners.

The report says that the extra steps required under HARP to refinance a loan from another lender make the process onerous and risky. A spokeswoman for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which is in charge of HARP, disputed the notion that it’s difficult to sign up new borrowers. “The additional information collected is minimal and appropriate, given that these lenders have no experience with or information on these (new) borrowers,” she said.

JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America all confirmed to ProPublica that they have seen an increase in the volume of applications for HARP refinancing since the new rules came into effect. Last month, American Banker reported that banks were scrambling to bolster their mortgage-servicing units to deal with the influx of applications from HARP.

The program is voluntary for banks, and they can place their own restrictions over and above those set by the government.

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America say they are only doing HARP refinancing for existing customers 2014 not seeking out new business on loans originated by other lenders. Wells Fargo is accepting refinance applications from borrowers at other servicers, but it is putting a cap on the amount that the loan can be underwater.

In January, according to the FHFA, roughly 50,000 people refinanced under the new HARP rules, and HARP’s share of all refinancing increased. Some smaller lenders, especially in states with the worst housing markets, are hoping to jump in and offer lower rates to people looking to leave their current bank, even with the greater risk.

by Cora Currier ProPublica, April 5, 2012, 3:10 p.m.

The article Lack of Competition Stifles Refinance Program for Underwater Homeowners appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

It was with some fanfare that the Obama administration announced last fall that it was ramping up a program to help students with federal loans reduce their monthly payments. Under the program, payments are adjusted based on how much students earn 2014 what’s known as income-based repayment.

Yet, even while the administration has emphasized easing the burden for student borrowers, some contractors with the Department of Education appear to be exacerbating it.

Bloomberg reported this week that some federally contracted debt collection agencies have been playing hardball with borrowers who are behind, insisting on payments the borrowers can’t afford 2014 even when federal student-loan rules allow more leniency.

The debt collectors have an incentive to be tough. As Bloomberg explains:

Under Education Department contracts, collection companies “rehabilitate” a defaulted loan by getting a borrower to make nine payments in 10 months. If they succeed, they reap a jackpot: a commission equal to as much as 16 percent of the entire loan amount, or $3,200 on a $20,000 loan.

These companies receive that fee only if borrowers make a minimum payment of 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the loan each month, depending on its size. For example, a $20,000 loan would require payments of about $200 a month. If the payment falls below that figure, the collector receives an administrative fee of $150.

The Department of Education is trying to balance its interest in helping struggling borrowers and stewarding taxpayer dollars, department spokesman Justin Hamilton told Bloomberg.

Striking that balance, it seems, hasn’t been easy. Consumer advocates chafed when President Obama, as part of a deficit-reduction plan promoted last fall, recommended allowing debt collectors to robo-call the cell phones of borrowers who fell behind on federal student loans and other debts to the government.

That plan didn’t get far. But the measure resurfaced as a line item [PDF] in Obama’s proposed 2013 budget last month.

As Bloomberg noted, federal student-loan rules require that collectors work out “reasonable and affordable” payments with borrowers to get them back on track, but the rules don’t spell out how such a calculation should be made. The Department of Education is meeting with key student-loan stakeholders this week to discuss, among other things , whether to use the income-based repayment formula to help set that standard. (As it stands, only borrowers who are current on their federal loans are eligible for help via income-based repayment.)

One thing that isn’t on the table at these rule-making meetings? A measure hailed by some advocates as potentially the single most important rule change for student borrowers who’ve become severely disabled and are seeking a discharge of their federal student loans. As we reported last year, the department initially pledged to overhaul the program and consider whether to simply accept Social Security determinations of disability instead of its current complex and opaque process. The department subsequently backed off that fix. Now it isn’t even on the agenda [PDF].

by Marian Wang ProPublica, March 29, 2012, 12:24 p.m.

The article While White House Emphasizes Easing Student Debt Burden, Fed Contractors Play Hardball appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

For an example of the fluidity of campaign finance rules, as well as the tangled web of connections between candidates and super PACs, look no further than the digital consulting firm Targeted Victory.

So far, the firm’s hauled in $4.1 million working for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and American Crossroads, the super PAC launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove. Just down the hall, its neighbors in Arlington, Va., include an office housing four other companies working for Romney, American Crossroads or the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future.

With the rise of super PACs, the jet-fueled political action committees that can take unlimited contributions, many campaign finance watchdogs have focused on the hundreds of millions of dollars being raised this presidential election cycle. But after the most recent campaign filings came in last week, ProPublica decided to track the other side of the equation: Where the money goes.

Our analysis found that more than $306 million has been spent so far by major super PACs and the five leading presidential candidates. In some cases, payees serve both candidates and the super PACs aligned with them, raising the specter that groups may be working together in ways that violate the rules, campaign finance experts said. We also found instances in which overseers of some political action committees directed hefty fees to their own companies, a legal form of self-dealing.

Among the top 200 payees, there were dozens of firms about which little is known. With generic names like Financial Innovations, Election Connections, Postage for Direct Mail Fundraising or Strategic Media Services, it’s sometimes unclear who runs them or exactly what they do. Many have short histories: Four of the six top-paid consulting firms for Winning Our Future, the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, have been launched since July.

At the same time, familiar names cropped up regularly among the top earners. Democratic strategists David Axelrod, Ronald Rosenblith and Barack Obama’s team from 2008 are back in place. On the Republican side, there were companies connected to Karl Rove, Carl Forti, David Carney and Michael Dubke.

Targeted Victory’s initial manager was Tony Feather, a close friend of Rove’s who served as the political director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000. Feather also co-founded longtime GOP consulting firm DCI Direct and its sister firm, FLS Connect. Targeted Victory co-founder Michael Beach oversaw the national voter turnout program for the Republican National Committee in the 2008 election cycle.

Like some other outside spending groups, super PACs are allowed to raise and spend unlimited funds, but they are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns.

Yet the rules governing “coordination” have been narrowly interpreted and rarely enforced by regulators. As long as candidates and super PACs don’t discuss the granular ins and outs of their spending, such as the placement and length of election ads, they can discuss strategy. Candidates can even help raise money for super PACs, or even, say, ask their father or good friend to donate.

Campaign-finance experts say there’s plenty of room for activity that average people would consider “coordination” that legally doesn’t count. They also said when consultants work for both a super PAC and a candidate, regulators should question whether they are operating independently.

“Any time it’s the same individual who is providing advice and services to a campaign and a super PAC, there is the danger of coordination,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine who runs the Election Law blog. “I’m sure most of the individuals playing these roles are getting legal advice on what they can and cannot do. The human brain being what it is, though, I think it is very difficult to separate those roles.”

Expenditure records show that a company called TargetPoint Consulting provides “survey research” to Mitt Romney’s campaign while also doing “direct mail consulting” for Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney super PAC. In February, the founder told The New York Times that while he understood it could look “ridiculous,” his company had gone to great lengths to prevent improprieties, setting up a firewall between employees working on the different campaigns.

Even when the ties between super PACs and candidates are less direct, spending records show how their spheres overlap. For example, partners of GOP polling company Public Opinion Strategies set up NMB Research, a polling company that works for Restore Our Future. One Public Opinion partner, Neil Newhouse, serves as the chief pollster for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

American Crossroads uses four of the same consultants as Restore Our Future and three of the same consultants as Romney’s campaign. (This is hardly a shock: Carl Forti, a former political director for Romney, is political director of American Crossroads and senior strategist for Restore Our Future.) TargetPoint Consulting works for all three groups, although it’s only done $1,700 worth of work for American Crossroads.

On the Democratic side, NGP VAN, a company that sells software that helps with fundraising and FEC compliance, has done work for both the Obama campaign and two super PACs backing Obama. The Obama campaign has paid NGP VAN $130,000; the two super PACs have paid it less than $17,000.

Beyond potential coordination, the analysis done by ProPublica also showed how some who have set up super PACs are directing donors’ cash into their own pockets.

GOP strategist Nick Ryan, a former aide to Rick Santorum, for instance, started his direct-mail and telemarketing firm, Global Intermediate LLC, shortly after launching the pro-Santorum super PAC, the Red White and Blue Fund. Global Intermediate is now the second-biggest vendor for Red White and Blue, earning almost $1.9 million so far.

While Ryan couldn’t be reached for comment, the super PAC’s spokesman, Stuart Roy, acknowledged in an email to the Los Angeles Times in February that Ryan’s participation with Global Intermediate was “no big mystery, they have done our phones and mail programs in multiple states (very effectively, I might add).”

Candidates are prohibited from using campaign funds for personal use and must pay “fair market value” if they hire companies run by relatives or other insiders, but super PACs, like regular PACs, have no such restrictions. For years, the FEC has asked Congress to expand the ban on candidates using campaign funds for personal use to PACs. So far, Congress has not acted.

“My standard sound-bite advice is 2018donor beware,’ when giving to any political action committee,” said Paul S. Ryan, of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.

Some insider transactions are on a smaller scale. A man named Gary Franchi Jr. runs both Revolution PAC, a super PAC known for its Ron Paul action figures, and Restore the Republic, a social networking site for Paul followers. Since last July, Revolution PAC has been paying Restore the Republic more than $1,700 a month for office rent. When asked if the office had telephones, desks and computers, Franchi replied: “Oh, yeah.”

But the office turned out to actually be a box in a Northbrook, Ill., UPS store. Franchi did not return follow-up calls for comment.

by Kim Barker and Al Shaw ProPublica, March 28, 2012, 1:02 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/

The article Campaign Spending Shows Political Ties, Self-Dealing appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

A Kashmiri-American accused of funneling money from Pakistan’s main spy agency to American politicians in a scheme to influence U.S. policy on Kashmir was sentenced to two years in federal prison Friday.

Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, 62, of Fairfax, Va., had pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy and tax violations in connection with moving at least $3.5 million from Pakistan’s government and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, mostly through his charity, the Kashmiri American Council. For more than 20 years, the charity had been the highest profile Kashmiri nonprofit in the U.S. As its leader, Fai had taken his case to top U.S. officials, rubbing shoulders with people like Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

Although Fai had publicly called for “self-determination” for the Indian side of Kashmir, the FBI insisted that he was privately working on behalf of Pakistan. Kashmir is the disputed Himalayan territory that has sparked two of the three wars between India and Pakistan and almost led to a fourth.

The sentencing capped a bizarre case, replete with twists and turns, including the death of Fai’s co-defendant in Pakistan. According to the FBI, dozens of emails between Fai and his handlers featured code words, such as “Brylcreem” for money, and “the library in Islamabad” for an ISI office.

Fai was initially charged with failing to register as a foreign agent in July, at the height of tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan. An FBI affidavit laid out how Fai had allegedly been a tool of the ISI and how he used Pakistan’s money to try to influence U.S. politicians, whether through campaign contributions or by hosting conferences.

It’s not clear where the ISI’s millions went. According to campaign finance records, Fai had given $28,165 to federal candidates and political parties since 1990, including $10,290 to Rep. Dan Burton, the Republican from Indiana. Others connected to Fai, his co-defendant and the Kashmiri American Council’s board donated at least $93,000. There’s no indication that either Fai’s board members or the politicians knew where Fai got his money.

In October, ProPublica documented Fai’s improbable rise from a poor villager in Indian Kashmir to Washington insider. Fai, who emigrated to the U.S. for graduate school in the 1980s, is one of the only people in recent history to be criminally charged with failing to register as a foreign agent.

The plea agreement reached in December did not mention that charge, and Fai never admitted to operating as an unregistered agent. Fai’s alleged accomplice, Zaheer Ahmad, a Pakistani-American doctor who ran one of the nicest hospitals in Pakistan, died in early October after apparently suffering a stroke in Islamabad.

The two men were accused of mounting an elaborate plot: Ahmad was accused of funneling money from the ISI to 13 straw donors, mostly Pakistani-American doctors and businessmen, who then gave the money to the Kashmiri American Council, claiming tax deductions. Ahmad then allegedly reimbursed the straw donors.

As part of his plea agreement, Fai admitted making false statements to U.S. officials about his ties to Pakistan’s government and that the Internal Revenue Service had lost as much as $400,000 in his scheme.

Fai had faced a maximum of eight years in prison. In filings with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., Fai’s lawyer argued that the seriousness of his offenses was mitigated by “the unspeakable suffering of the Kashmiri people that motivated his crimes, as well as his demonstrated remorse.”

U.S. prosecutors had asked for Fai to be sentenced to four years in prison, saying that he showed no remorse. “The opposite is true,” argued Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney on the case, in filings with the court. He said Fai was only sorry for the damage he had caused to the Kashmiri movement by linking his group with the ISI.

Fai had sent a seven-page, single-spaced letter to the court, outlining the history of Kashmir but mentioning nothing about his dealings with the ISI.

“In fact, nowhere is the ISI even mentioned,” Kromberg wrote, outlining the U.S. position. “Nowhere is any mention of a single lie that Fai made to the American people and Government in the course of innumerable lies over a period of decades.”

by Kim Barker ProPublica, March 30, 2012, 6:09 p.m.

The article Two Year Sentence for Man Accused in Pakistan Spy Plot appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

This story was co-produced with NPR and PBS’ “Frontline.” Listen to NPR’s Morning Edition for more.

March 30: This post has been clarified.

A senior pathologist in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office has sharply questioned the forensic evidence used to convict a 51-year-old woman of shaking her 7-week-old grandson to death, identifying a host of flaws in the case.

The new report by the pathologist, Dr. James Ribe, details eight “diagnostic problems” with the coroner’s 1996 ruling that the child had died from violent shaking or a forceful blow to the head. Ribe wrote that he saw little evidence that the infant had been attacked, noting “the complete absence of bodily trauma, such as face trauma, grab marks, bruises, rib fractures, or neck trauma.”

Shirley Ree Smith was convicted of felony child endangerment 2014 a charge equivalent to second-degree murder 2014 in the case, and she’s garnered national attention over the course of a long legal campaign to clear her name. Smith insists that she never harmed the infant, Etzel Glass, who died in an apartment in Van Nuys, Calif.

After watching her legal appeals bounce from court to court for the past 15 years, Smith is currently out of custody, but is facing a possible return to state prison. She has petitioned California Gov. Jerry Brown for clemency, asking him to commute her sentence.

Ribe’s review, which reveals a deep divide within the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, could influence the governor’s decision. Other doctors in the office reassessed the case and stood by the homicide ruling.

Los Angeles prosecutors constructed the case against Smith largely on the findings of medical experts working for the county coroner. During an autopsy, forensic pathologists discovered a small amount of bleeding on the infant’s brain and in his optic nerves. They concluded the death was a homicide.

Documents obtained by ProPublica, NPR and PBS “Frontline” show the coroner’s office in January asked several staff doctors to take a second look at Glass’s death. As part of that effort Ribe examined the autopsy report, tissue slides and other forensic evidence.

In Ribe’s view, the injuries to the child’s brain were relatively minor and could have been caused by the birth process. He also noted the baby’s lungs were speckled with tiny blood spots called petechiae, which are often linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and suffocation, and pointed out that Glass had been sleeping face-down on an “unsafe sleep surface” — a couch cushion — on the night of his death.

The “bottom line,” wrote Ribe, is “there was head trauma, but we don’t know when it happened or how it happened. We don’t know if it’s related to the cause of death. The conservative approach would be to acknowledge these unknowns. The cause of death should be diagnosed as undetermined.”

Reached by phone, Ribe declined to comment.

Smith’s advocates said Ribe’s review strikes at the foundation of the case against her.

“This case wouldn’t go to trial today,” said Michael Brennan, a law professor at the University of Southern California and one of Smith’s attorneys. “I am confident that the DA’s office would never try this case again.”

Dr. Eugene Carpenter, who supervised the original autopsy, remains certain that Glass’s death was a homicide. As part of the recent review, Carpenter went through autopsy case files again. He stood by his original assessment, stating that Glass died as a result of abuse.

“Death is not due to natural causes and certainly not due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” Carpenter wrote in his report. “There is no reasonable doubt as to the cause of death.”

Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, the chief medical examiner-coroner, largely concurred, writing that the baby was the victim of abuse that injured his brain and may also have been intentionally suffocated.

The coroner’s office would not address the conflicting views about the case.

“The cause and manner of death of any person is an opinion and those opinions are based on multiple criteria,” said Craig Harvey, the chief investigator and head of operations for the agency, in an email. “The Department of Coroner will not be making any further comment on this case.”

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley recently sent a letter to the governor saying that medical evidence presented during Smith’s trial was valid. Granting her clemency due to concerns about the soundness of that evidence, Cooley wrote, would have a “chilling effect,” making it more difficult to prosecute child abusers.

Sandi Gibbons, Cooley’s spokeswoman, declined to comment on the case, as did the governor.

On the night of Glass’s death, Smith says she was sleeping on the floor as the baby and another grandchild slept on a nearby couch. Smith’s daughter, Tomeka, and other family members were in the next room.

In a recent interview, Smith vehemently and tearfully denied ever hurting her grandson. “I didn’t do it,” she said. “There’s no way I could possibly do that. Why would I do that? I mean why? Why would I shake him?”

A Unique Theory

In the decade and a half since Smith was convicted, much has changed in the world of forensics. The National Academy of Sciences in 2009 issued a lengthy report highlighting flaws in the country’s coroner and medical examiner system and criticizing the techniques used in law enforcement crime labs.

Among doctors there’s an increasing awareness of ailments and conditions that can mimic the typical symptoms of child abuse — bleeding and bruising. The leading textbook on pediatric head injuries now includes two chapters on these mimics; they range from sickle cell anemia to congenital brain malformations to unintentional damage caused by the use of forceps or vacuums during birth.

Ribe’s analysis notes that Glass’s death doesn’t fit the usual pattern for shaken baby syndrome cases, which are typically marked by a triad of symptoms: bleeding on the brain and in the retinas, and swelling of the brain.

Glass had only one of these symptoms, a tablespoon or two of blood, pooled on top of his brain.

During Smith’s trial, Carpenter testified the bleeding wasn’t severe enough to kill the baby.

But on the witness stand, Carpenter voiced a novel theory about the death, telling jurors that Glass was shaken or slammed so forcefully that his brainstem was fatally — but invisibly — damaged, shutting his whole body down instantly. “There is no evidence” of the brain stem injury,” Carpenter testified, “and there is no evidence expected to be found in a shaken infant that dies quickly because the body does not have time to react to the injury.”

The jury convicted Smith of child endangerment, and she spent the next decade of her life dwelling in a California women’s prison. “The hardest part of being locked up was knowing that I didn’t belong there,” Smith said. “And being away from my daughter and grandkids.”

While Carpenter’s testimony persuaded the jury, it didn’t sway the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2006 overturned Smith’s conviction. The court found “there was simply no demonstrable support for shaking as the cause of death.” Smith’s incarceration, added the court, had “very likely been a miscarriage of justice.”

The ruling freed Smith from prison after 10 years. “I felt a sense of relief. I couldn’t believe it was happening,” she recalled.

But when the initial joy wore off, Smith had difficulty resuming her life in the free world. Her collision with the criminal justice system carried lingering psychological effects, leaving her feeling “lost” and fearful, she said. After a stint in a cheap hotel on Los Angeles’s skid row and a bout of homelessness, Smith eventually moved to the Midwest, where Tomeka and her surviving grandchildren were living.

Her legal struggle, however, continued. The California attorney general appealed the case, and late last year, a divided U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit. “The Court of Appeals in this case substituted its judgment for that of a California jury on the question whether the prosecution’s or the defense’s expert witnesses more persuasively explained the cause of a death,” wrote the court in an unsigned opinion.

At the high court’s direction, the 9th Circuit reinstated Smith’s conviction in February of this year.

That move prompted Brennan, and his co-counsel, Dennis Riordan, to petition Brown to commute Smith’s sentence to the 10 years she has served, rather than returning her to a prison cell.

In a letter to the governor, the attorneys note that prosecutors recently asked pediatrician Carol Berkowitz to review the evidence. The doctor’s report contradicts Carpenter’s theory that Glass died nearly instantly after someone abused him — and highlights the lack of scientific consensus among medical experts when it comes to sudden infant fatalities.

Though Berkowitz believes Glass suffered head injuries due to abuse, she is uncertain about when the trauma occurred. “I think that one cannot say with medical certainty the precise time when these injuries were inflicted (e.g., whether immediate or within a specified number of hours),” wrote Berkowitz, a UCLA pediatrics professor and executive vice chair of the pediatrics department at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Tomeka Smith is adamant that nobody abused her child. “Our family is so loving it’s ridiculous,” she said in an interview, adding that she has complete faith in her mother.

“My mother never spanked me, she never cursed me, she never yelled at me,” Tomeka Smith recalled. “There’s no possible way she could’ve done what they say. If I had any doubt about that, I would’ve wanted her prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Today, Tomeka and Shirley Smith are living together in Alexandria, Minn., a quaint town of approximately 11,000 people located about midway between Fargo and Minneapolis. They share a small, tidy apartment with Tomeka’s children, Marquis and Yondale, both teenagers. Tomeka’s daughter, Yolanda, is attending college in Nevada.

On a recent afternoon, Shirley Smith greeted Yondale as he came home from school carrying a battered skateboard. She cooks for the boys, helps them with their homework, and generally keeps an eye out for them while Tomeka works at Walmart.

She knows the family reunion could end at any moment.

“I’m not free. … I can’t go anywhere without permission,” Smith said. “They’re trying to send me back to prison.”

Clarification: This post has been clarified to reflect that Smith was charged and found guilty of felony child endangerment, which is equivalent to second-degree murder.

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Joseph Shapiro, NPR March 29, 2012, 5 a.m.

The article New Evidence in High Profile Shaken Baby Case appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome 2014 it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station,” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves 2014 and we want your help. Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Campaigns and super PACs are required to report their spending on independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission within a day or two, but they often just report how much they paid ad-buying firms, which can disguise how much actual ads cost and where they’re airing.

What’s more, the files could be a window into what may be otherwise undisclosed spending by “dark money” nonprofit groups that are playing an increasing role in the elections .

For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.

As our PAC Track interactive chart shows, Restore Our Future has spent more than twice as much as any other PAC so far 2014 nearly $37 million. Medill student O’Donoghue said getting the files from the ABC station took her about half an hour, most of which was spent wrestling with the copy machine. Tonyan, another graduate student, said he spent 15 minutes at the CW affiliate, plus a 15-minute drive.

Both said the station employees who helped them were friendly and accommodating. We encountered the same when I visited five stations in New York, Missouri and Florida. Typically, a station employee will simply show you the room where the files are kept and let you dig in. Such visits don’t seem to happen often. A log at the New York CBS affiliate showed only six registered visitors since October 2011.

The Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, tracks ads that have hit the airwaves and estimates what they would cost, but the company charges high rates to obtain the information. The Wesleyan Media Project publishes some CMAG data.

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, found that $70 million in advertising had been unreported from 2000-10 in Michigan. He got that number by personally examining public files, at one point driving 14 hours for a 15-minute visit to a station.

He told the FCC: “I can testify to you, unequivocally, that the threshold of effort necessary to report this important public interest story is too high for every news organization in Michigan, except mine.” Which is why we’re asking for your help. You can help expose spending that might otherwise remain hidden in your television market. Sign up here.

by Daniel Victor ProPublica, March 20, 2012, 3:29 p.m.

Image Courtesy of  Frontpage / Shutterstock.com

The article If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political Ads, We Will appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

March 21: This post has been corrected.

When the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that tests showed the water is safe to drink in Dimock, Penn., a national hot spot for concerns about fracking, it seemed to vindicate the energy industry’s insistence that drilling had not caused pollution in the area.

But what the agency didn’t say 2013 at least, not publicly 2013 is that the water samples contained dangerous quantities of methane gas, a finding that confirmed some of the agency’s initial concerns and the complaints raised by Dimock residents since 2009.

The test results also showed the group of wells contained dozens of other contaminants, including low levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and heavy metals that exceed the agency’s “trigger level” and could lead to illness if consumed over an extended period of time. The EPA’s assurances suggest that the substances detected do not violate specific drinking water standards, but no such standards exist for some of the contaminants and some experts said the agency should have acknowledged that they were detected at all.

“Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate,” said Ron Bishop, a chemist at the State University of New York’s College at Oneonta, who has spoken out about environmental concerns from drilling.

Dimock residents are struggling to reconcile the EPA’s public account with the results they have been given in private.

“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet 2013 I’m over the thresholds 2013 and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” said Scott Ely, a Dimock resident whose water contains methane at three times the state limit, as well as lithium, a substance that can cause kidney and thyroid disorders. “I’m confused about the whole thing2026 I’m flabbergasted.”

The water in Dimock first became the focus of international attention after residents there alleged in 2009 that natural gas drilling, and fracking, had led to widespread contamination. That April, ProPublica reported that a woman’s drinking water well blew up. Pennsylvania officials eventually determined that underground methane gas leaks had been caused by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was drilling wells nearby. Pennsylvania sanctioned Cabot, and for a short time the company provided drinking water to households in the Dimock area.

This January, the EPA announced it would take over the state’s investigation, testing the water in more than 60 homes and agreeing to provide drinking water to several of families 2013 including the Elys 2013 in the meantime.

Then, last Thursday, the EPA released a brief statement saying that the first 11 samples to come back from the lab “did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern.” The agency noted that some metals, methane, salt and bacteria had been detected, but at low levels that did not exceed federal thresholds. It said that arsenic exceeding federal water standards was detected in two samples.

But Dimock residents say the agency’s description didn’t jibe with the material in test packets distributed to them, and they voiced concerns about why the EPA had passed judgment before seeing results from nearly 50 homes. Several shared raw data and materials they were given by the EPA with Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “GasLand,” who shared them with ProPublica.

EPA press secretary Betsaida Alcantara said the agency was trying to be forthcoming by giving the tests results to Dimock residents and is now considering whether to release more information to the public about the water samples. “We made a commitment to the residents that we would give them the information as soon as we had it,” she said. “For the sake of transparency we felt it was the right thing to do.”

However preliminary, the data is significant because it is the first EPA research into drilling-related concerned on the east coast, and the agency’s first new information since it concluded that there was likely a link between fracking and water contamination in central Wyoming last December. The EPA is currently in the midst of a national investigation into the effects of fracking on groundwater, but that research is separate.

As the agency has elsewhere, the EPA began the testing in Dimock in search of methane and found it.

Methane is not considered poisonous to drink, and therefore is not a health threat in the same way as other pollutants. But the gas can collect in confined spaces and cause deadly explosions, or smother people if they breathe too much of it. Four of the five residential water results obtained by ProPublica show methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards; one as high as seven times the threshold and nearly twice the EPA’s less stringent standard.

The methane detections were accompanied by ethane, another type of natural gas that experts say often signifies the methane came from deeply buried gas deposits similar to those being drilled for energy and not from natural sources near the surface.

Among the other substances detected at low levels in Dimock’s water are a suite of chemicals known to come from some sort of hydrocarbon substance, such as diesel fuel or roofing tar. They include anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene2013 all substances described by a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as cancer-causing even in very small amounts. Chromium, aluminum, lead and other metals were also detected, as were chlorides, salts, bromide and strontium, minerals that can occur naturally but are often associated with natural gas drilling.

It is unclear whether these contaminants have any connection to drilling activities near Dimock. The agency says it plans further testing and research.

Many of the compounds detected have not been evaluated for exposure risk by federal scientists or do not have an exposure limit assigned to them, making it difficult to know whether they present a risk to human health.

Inconsistencies in the EPA’s sampling results also are raising concerns. EPA documents, for example, list two different thresholds for the detection of bromide, a naturally occurring substance sometimes used in drilling fluids, opening up the possibility that bromide may have been detected, but not reported, in some tests.

“The threshold that it is safe, that shouldn’t be changing,” said Susan Riha, director of the New York State Water Resources Institute and a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. “For some reason 2026 one was twice as sensitive as the other one.”

The EPA did not respond to questions about the detection limits, or any other technical inquiries about the test data.

A spokesman for Cabot declined to comment on the water test results or their significance, saying that he had not yet seen the data.

Correction: This post said EPA tests had detected bromium in some Dimock water wells. It should have said bromide. Also, the post identified Susan Riha as the director of the New York State Water Resources Group. She is the director of the Water Resources Institute at Cornell University.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, March 20, 2012, 2:42 p.m.

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